As a result, said Louis Steinberger, president of a New Jersey soft-drink trade association, his industry found business “so good under Prohibition that we are determined to offend neither the Wets nor the Drys, and let the fight go merrily on.”

In wet New Jersey, prosecutors addressed the overload with a modus vivendi that made Willebrandt despair: they would “please the Drys by filing cases,” she recalled years later, “and take care of the Wets by never bringing the cases to trial.”